KANT'S CRITIQUE OF TELEOLOGY IN BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION

146 Interpretations of the Antinomy
Today, a hundred years later and out of context, these
remarks of the young Adickes sound rather peculiar, but the basic
idea put forward here in somewhat extreme form is nonetheless
still quite widespread. The key role played by Adickes in the reception
of Kant in this century depends not only on his work on
ordering and publishing Kant's manuscripts and tracing his scientific
sources but also lies in his attempt to separate the chaff from
the wheat in Kant's system. Since Adickes' basic idea in one form or
the other is still taken as self-evident by many commentators, it will
be worthwhile to examine this approach to interpretation in some
detail. Although Kant may in fact be the only modern philosopher
who can seriously compete with Plato and Aristotle as the subject
matter of academic treatises, he is nonetheless in a class of his own
when it comes to the question of how many of his own admirers take
him to be tendentially mentally ill. Kant is often seen as the
prototypical architectonic psychopath.
Adickes' thesis that certain parts of Kant's works were written
for "systematical" reasons cannot simply be dismissed out of
hand, and within the framework of the theory of the intellectual
make-up of the scientific personality developed by Adickes and
others it may even have some plausibility. At first, the thesis of
Kant's systematics as a system-building factor merely asserts the
indubitable fact that Kant used the conceptual instruments developed
in the Critique of Pure Reason to deal with any new problems
that happened to arise for him. It would also not be surprising to
learn that Kant chose his objects of investigation with an eye to
whether or not they were readily analyzable with these conceptual
means. Perhaps, too, in later writings the means are not so much
determined by the object studied, but rather the object overwhelmed
by the means. These means determine what kinds of problems
become visible in the first place, and their application might even
create problems which would otherwise not have been there —
which does not, however, mean that they are simply imaginary. The
thesis is employed by Adickes as a hermeneutical instrument to
distinguish what is 'important' from what is 'unimportant'. The
procedure distinguishes reasons of philosophical content for a
proposition from private, psychological motivations. The notion that
Kant wrote the "Dialectic of Teleological Judgment" only because a
Critique must have a Dialectic and a Dialectic must contain an
antinomy assumes that Kant conjured up the Dialectic and that no